


TSSM Day 8

by MaybeDefinitely404



Series: Soulmate September [8]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Brief body horror, Car Accidents, Death, Frostbite, Hypothermia, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Past Character Death, but in a good way, but no gore, it's hard to describe, so they're all dead, technical character death because the fic takes place in the afterlife, the death is very brief and nondescript
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28866744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaybeDefinitely404/pseuds/MaybeDefinitely404
Summary: The temperature of your chest gets hotter when you are closer to your soulmate and colder when you move away.Janus always ran cold, and it takes him dying to realize why.
Relationships: Deceit | Janus Sanders & Morality | Patton Sanders
Series: Soulmate September [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2116602
Comments: 2
Kudos: 51





	TSSM Day 8

**Author's Note:**

> Check the tags before reading! 
> 
> Word Count: 2.8k

It started when Janus was two. His parents were awoken by his feral cries, throwing open the door to his room, imagining the worst. They recoiled immediately upon touching him, his skin almost freezing to the touch. They closed the bedroom window and piled him in more layers until he stopped wailing, but that was only the start. 

When he was six, his mother explained soulmates to him. He looked at her with huge eyes, fiddling with the sleeves of his oversized hoodie, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. 

When he was ten, he had grown sick and tired of the constant cold. A majority of his classmates and friends hadn’t met their soulmates yet, but they all didn’t seem as bothered by it as he was. They didn’t keep their winter jackets on in class, no matter the season, and their hands were never too cold to hold a pencil.

When he was thirteen, he caught hypothermia. At the insistence of his older brother, he joined him outside in the snow for a hike in the forest. His countless layers and heat pads in his pockets only did so much when they got hopelessly lost in the woods, and while his brother seemed to be unaffected by the cold, Janus woke up the next day in the hospital. He could vaguely remember falling face first into the snow, his cold slowly morphing into pleasant warmth, his brother shouting his name. The doctors were unable to save his left eye, leaving him half blind, and his frostbite scars never quite disappeared. They said the very fact that he survived was some kind of miracle. He didn’t go into the snow after that. 

When he was sixteen, his mother took him to a doctor. After thorough examination, the man could find nothing wrong with him. He suggested B-12 supplements and a list of ways to increase his circulation, and when that did nothing to help months later, he sat them both down in his office and explained it most likely meant Janus’ soulmate had died. Janus didn’t know until that moment that it was possible to miss someone you’ve never met, but he cried on the way home. His mom said nothing. 

When he was eighteen, Janus was alone. He had become reclusive and standoffish, unwilling to spend time around any of the people who tried to befriend him. All of them had soulmates. All of them got to be happy. 

When he was twenty, his family suggested group therapy for those who had lost their soulmates, and he had reluctantly gone to one session. For a moment, he felt at home, surrounded by other people in thick sweaters and jackets and gloves, until he learned that all of them had lost their soulmates after meeting them. They had been able to spend years together, enjoying each other’s company, before losing the love of their life. When he explained his situation, he was only met with the same sympathetic looks he’d received everywhere else in life, and he never went back. 

When he was twenty-two, he graduated with his Bachelor’s degree in psychology. The crowd was the quietest it had been all night; no one knew this guy, but it felt wrong to not cheer at all. He shook the Dean’s hand with thick yellow gloves and took the diploma, ignoring the man’s confused raised eyebrow and walking away to the noise of half-hearted claps. 

When he was twenty-five, life was okay. Not good, just okay. He’d found a lab job in the psychological social experiment aspect that paid decently and wasn’t a total bore. Most nights he was numb, especially after experiments that revolved around soulmates, so he turned on Netflix and poured a glass of wine and fell asleep on the couch, wrapped in a thick weighted blanket. Life is fine, he told himself. It could be worse. 

And when Janus was twenty-seven, he died. It was an accident; a mix of a long tiring day and an ignored red light just as he was crossing the street. The car barreled through the intersection, other car horns blaring, and he looked up just in time to see the person looking down, probably on their phone. He’d never know. The impact was quick, and he didn’t even have time to feel pain before the world went dark. He was a little grateful for that.

It stayed dark for a long while after that. Well, in full honesty, he didn’t know how long it was. It felt like a long time, but it also felt extraordinarily short. The seconds turned to years and millennia became mere minutes, the very concept of time fading away just as he did. A minuscule part of him was still aware that he was conscious, and he probably should have been a little scared of that, because did that mean he was destined to float around as an unattached subconscious for eternity? A larger part of him was just relieved to finally rest, with the weight of student debt and an exhaustingly lonely life finally gone. 

Until it wasn’t. The light crept into the center of his vision first and he grumbled in annoyance. Let me just enjoy it a second longer, he thought distantly, but the light didn’t listen as it slowly spread across his vision like molasses. For the first time in his life, he realized with a start, he didn’t feel cold. There was a heat in his chest that he’d never felt before, and he was scared when the darkness faded, so would the warmth. 

“Janus, are you okay?” A desperate voice broke through his dark haze in whisps, slowly clearing the fog that had set in. It rambled on, “Oh, stupid question. You just died. Sorry! Can you see me?”

His vision lit up all the way, replacing the darkness but not taking away the heat. Perfect. He was about to answer no to the stranger’s question; there was just a blur of blue and white and green, until the figure loomed that much closer and came into focus. It was a man, probably his age, with bright blue eyes and floppy golden hair, his freckled nose just inches from Janus’. His eyes held concern but he was smiling like no tomorrow. The man seemed to realize when Janus could in fact see him clearly and backed away, holding out a hand to help him up. Why was he lying on the ground? Where was he?

That question was answered as soon as he took the offered hand, looking around him in shock. Apparently the dark void hadn’t held him for as long as he thought. A distant siren pierced the air, and people’s shouts rang over each other as they milled around the body in the street, his body. The car that had hit him was nowhere to be seen. It was all too surreal, too uncomfortable, and he turned back to the man standing in front of him. They were standing on the sidewalk, just meters away from the gruesome scene on the street, and Janus suddenly felt very lightheaded. 

“I carried you away as soon as your soul formed. Didn’t want to overwhelm you when you opened your eyes for the first time.”

“I’m dead?”

“Yep,” The man answered just a bit too cheerfully, before noticing the newcomer’s expression and softening, “Sorry. I’ve been here for a while, the shock has kind of worn down.”

“What’s here?”

“The afterlife. Deathny World. Aliven’t. I’ve heard it all.”

“Ah,” Janus choked, trying to take in the environment around him without looking at his own dead body, or the paramedics that had just arrived on the scene. It looked like the real world, and obviously they were still in the real world to some extent since he was witnessing the aftereffects of his own death, but the subtle mist floating through the air was definitely new. It curled through the air gently, resting on every surface it could land on, coloring the world with soft rainbow hues. It was the real world, it was just as if he was seeing more of it for the first time. The parts that were invisible before. An orange tuft graced by his ear and he could just make out the sound of someone laughing, the smell of fresh bread, the taste of fresh jam on a summer morning. A smile tugged at his lips before he realized.

“Forgotten memories,” The man spoke up, as if reading his mind. “Every lost memory of every person winds up here. Mostly good ones, but some are bad. You’ll learn how to sift through them soon enough.” 

Janus was finally able to pull himself away from the colorful world, staring into the bright eyes of the stranger. “Who are you?”

“I’m Patton,” he said with a new grin, scratching the back of his neck nervously, “I’m your soulmate.”

————————————–

It took Janus a much longer time than he would have liked to admit to unfreeze from the revelation, Patton taking his hand gently and sinking them out to a new location. His stomach churned upon rising up, the new sensation making him nauseous. He didn’t recognize where they were, some cafe, and Patton gently pushed him into a seat before strolling up to the counter with no hesitation, starting a conversation with the barista and gesturing to Janus. The mist, the lost memories, were gone, replaced with a golden haze that gave the world a soft glow. The air was thick with the smell of coffee beans and cookies that instantly calmed Janus’ stomach. When Patton finally walked back to him, two mugs in hand, he explained. 

“This is the soul world. We can pop in from the real world to this one whenever we want. Some souls choose to stay on one side predominantly, some switch back and forth a lot.” 

“This single cafe is the soul world?”

“Oh! No, my bad! There’s a whole lot more outside. I’ll have to show you later. Right now, though, just relax. You’ve had a… long day, to say the least.” He pushed one of the cups into Janus’ grasp.

“What is it?” He asked skeptically. It looked like coffee, but who’s to say anything anymore. 

“Whatever you want it to be. Think of your favorite drink, then try it.”

Janus narrowed his eyes but lifted the mug to his lifts, trying to think of a single drink he liked. His mind decided that this was the ideal moment to forget everything he ever drank in his entire short life, so when he finally took a sip, the liquid was disgustingly tasteless. Like warm water. He set the drink down, watching Patton intensely.

Janus took in his appearance, his general shock finally beginning to wear off. An open light blue button up over a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was pretty much Janus’ definition of cute, what with those stupidly adorable dimples and little golden locket hanging on his neck. If he’d met him when he was alive, he no doubt would have fallen head over heels for him. 

“You’re my soulmate? How is that…” He cleared his throat, hoping he wasn’t blushing, “How is that possible?”

Patton hummed, wiping off what appeared to be a hot chocolate moustache, “I died when I was three. Cancer.”

“That’s awful.”

Patton shrugged, taking another sip, “It wasn’t great. I woke up by myself, still half wedged in my own corpse. It was terrifying. My parents were crying, and I tried to tell them I was there, somehow, but they couldn’t see me.”

“Totally not traumatic at all.” 

The man actually laughed, despite the dark story, “I had to figure everything out for myself. Sinking down, navigating both worlds, how to control my own form… which you are doing surprisingly well at, by the way.” 

Janus glanced down at himself. He definitely wasn’t alive, that much was sure, if the wisps of yellow smoke cascading down him were any indication. If he concentrated hard enough, the fog began to disappear, leaving him looking normal, albeit a bit paler. As soon as his mind drifted, however, the golden trails were back.

“This was the first place I was able to rise up in in this world. It’s kind of an easy access point. I popped up behind the counter, scared the living daylights out of Virgil.” He pointed to the barista who was currently chatting with another person ghost, laughing over identical mugs with them. “He’s been here a while. Two hundred years, give or take.”

Janus paled, the idea of eternity becoming just that much more real. “Oh…”

“Yeah. He kind of raised me. And then when I was old enough to understand, he explained that I’d left a soulmate behind. I cried for hours after that.” He smiled sadly, finally meeting Janus’ eyes. 

“You knew my name,” The younger recalled suddenly, sitting up a little straighter, “Right when I was waking up, you said my name.”

Patton looked almost sheepish, focusing back on the cup between his hands, “After Virgil told me… I kind of made it my personal mission to find my soulmate. I spent a lot of time in the real world, years, trying to find you, and of course checking in on my parents sometimes. Ghosts don’t need sleep, we can sleep, if we want, but we don’t need to, so it was a constant search. And then, my parents both ended up in the hospital, long story, and I wanted to be there when they woke up. Make their transition into the new world a little easier than mine was,” His expression lit up, wiggling a little in his seat, “And while I was there, I stumbled across a certain young patient with severe frostbite and hypothermia.”

“Me.”

“Mmhm. And I felt this weird warmth in my chest, which is weird, because ghosts don’t really feel temperature. It didn’t last that long, just a couple seconds, really, but it was enough time to know.”

“The soulbond.”

“Yep.”

They both drank in unison. This time, Janus’ drink tasted like the unsweetened chamomile tea from the hospital. He made a sour face and put the cup back down. He stared into his reflection for a moment, almost captivated in the sloshing against the sides of the mug, before Patton spoke again.

“I spent most of my time in the alive-world after that. With you. And it sucked, because there was nothing I wanted more than to talk to you and hug you and just let you know I existed… you were so sad…”

“Yeah…” Janus mumbled, tapping the ridge of his cup with his fingernail. “Is that why you were at the accident?”

“I tried to stop it,” Patton whispered, a look of pure guilt crossing his face, “I couldn’t tug you back though, and you didn’t hear me. So the least I could do was pull you out when you formed and take you away from the crowd.” 

The odd language was starting to confuse Janus, the weird differentiation between his soul and his body, the terminology regarding the soul world he didn’t understand… it was all just a lot. 

“So… Do we age? You’re obviously not three anymore. But the barista doesn’t look two hundred.”

“Virgil. And… I don’t know.”

“ _Very_ comforting.”

“You’re sassy.”

“That I am.” 

For the first time in a very long time, Janus’ lips twitched into a smile in response to the absolute beam on Patton’s face. No one had ever taken his snark as anything other than bitchiness, but this guy, his soulmate, seemed to love it. 

“As far as I know, we won’t. I think I only aged along with you, and now that you’re here, we’re probably done.” He had finished his drink, the barista swooping in out of nowhere and plucking it from his grasp with an impish grin. Patton shouted his thanks as Virgil disappeared into the back room. “He’s been waiting to meet you for a long time. But he can be a handful, so we’ll save proper introductions until you’re settled. Speaking of which…” He stood up, smoothing out his shirt and offering his hand to Janus once more. “I can show you where residency is, if you’d like. It might be nice to take a nap, just to process.”

Janus considered. The vague sounding ‘residency’ was intriguing, but he was much too restless to sleep right now. He voiced as much. “Maybe later. Do you think you could show me around first?”

The grin Patton gave him was bright enough to power a city block. Janus took the extended hand and the man squealed, pulling him towards the door excitedly. Yeah. He was definitely already falling for the literal ball of sunshine that was his soulmate. 

“One grand tour of the afterlife, coming up!” 


End file.
